I'm curious, though, how big do you think the market is for applets? Do you have specific numbers (number of games in x months, etc) in mind for your website? Most of the games on the other java sites aren't applets, so where will you be getting most of your content from? Mostly existing games? Or new?

Yes, woogley's tone inappropriate. And I'm sure a lot of the other flames against goussej elsewhere are inappropriate too, but goussej isn't without blame.

If a person has strong beliefs then they must expect to get strong resistance as well.

[...]

What goussej is doing isn't wrong, one could even say that some of the goals he's trying to achieve is noble, but at some point it's going to start annoying people. And once you've reached that threshold you have a choice: back off, or face the flak.

goussej, you started the misquoting. You took jojoh's words and based on that single quoted sentence you made it sound as if he denies the existance all Java portals. The context of his message is clear. The subject line mentions "applet" as does the introductory paragraph.

Now I understand that you're not a native English speaker, so if this was your first post I would ascribe your misunderstanding to that. But from the way you have posted here before, most people will get the idea that your post has some malicious intent.

I fully understand what you stand for, and I understand that you are passionate about it, but perhaps you come across a bit different from what you think?

People aren't going to join your cause or even feel sympathy for you if they perceive you to be an aggressive zealot. Especially not when you base your arguments on misquotes/misunderstandings.

Does anyone know of a library or something for Java that allows me to play SID files? I don't want a frontend or a complete C64 emulator. And I don't really want to dig in C64 emu code to cut out the sound playback bits.Thanks.

I suspect you'll largely be limited by the speed of the collision detection, most physics engines are slanted towards geometric primitives (circles, rectangles) rather than poly meshes.

That sort of answers my problem, but how much will polygons affect the speed? Are there some benchmark results for the available engines?

If the polycount was reduced to triangles then the shards won't look too good when a bunch of triangles are laying around. And there won't really be any optimization, once the object is broken the shards remain there as new objects.

Mmm, or maybe I should just rethink the effect I want to achieve from this.

Your method is to have the object throw off triangle, kind of like when something gets chipped?

What I want is for the object to kind of "explode" once its taken enough damage. The "explosion" will be the bits that are formed from the cracks.

I don't want the physics engine to handle the cracking. The L-system will determine the crack pattern. The physics engine must handle all the bits that come loose.

Once an object breaks the bits that come loose must be handled by the engine, the same way "rolling a box" would be handled. Once these broken bits come to a standstill they must remain there as smaller objects, not as particle effects. So if something was to happen that disturbed the bits' rest then they should once more roll along or whatever.

The area in which this destructability occurs could potentially lead to a lot of broken bits. My question is how many such bits can the engine handle before becoming slow?

Maybe I should only have asked how many objects the physics engine can handle at a time. I only mention the cracking to show how the objects will originate and how they will be, ie. smallish polygons.

The objects that can break will be textured, like a brick wall or a wooden box. Then I would assign a crack pattern to each of those. The patterns are just an L-system string like "AABA[AB]BA". So when the object gets hit I would draw the "pattern" associated with that substring of letters, onto the object (how would you do this with triangles?). The lengths of the crack lines will be determined by the size of the object so that the crack always goes through after a certain amount of hits.

Then when the object gets broken I use the L-system string to calculate the polygon points and remove the original object and replace it with the broken bits and then the physics engine kicks in to make them fall down and roll and whatever. These bits should still be visible and react to physics, for example when an object below that one gets blown up too.

Using an L-system isn't very difficult as I've used it before. But my issue is how will the physics engine react when 10 crates each blow up into 10 bits each? It now needs to calculate the movements of 100 polygons, and most probably much more when near everything on the screen can be destroyed. If these were done with particle effects then it wouldn't matter but then these bits won't act like they should.

Or do you think I'm a bit overoptimistic in what the current physics engines can handle?

I'm thinking of how to implement destructability in objects by simulating cracks with a kind of L-system (like the way 2d trees are drawn). Eventually when the cracks reach the other end bits will break off (these bits are determined by the L-system pattern).

I'm new to how physics engines work, but how severly does the size of objects affect performance? And what if the objects are polygons? How many objects can these engines typically handle at a time when they all are moving?

The bits that break off should not be treated as particles from an emitter because these bits should still act as objects that can be moved, but they just won't be crackable anymore.

All of this will be in 2d platformer type environment, using something like phys2d.

I downloaded the full version onto my Sony Ericsson P990. A few quick things about that phone: it has a 240x320 touchscreen, it has a qwerty keyboard (I removed the numpad) but the keyboard has arrow keys. This is probably not a phone you targeted the game, but anyways.

I didn't play this too long though, I have to study a lot right now. First up, the problems/errors:

The menu system in the game is the only visual thing broken on my phone. The scroll (at a smaller resolution than my screen) gets centered but the bottom bar goes all the way to the bottom so there's a lot of white. But the menu works fine. The battles and the main map are stretched to the full screen. The P990 does some automatic scaling of the canvas.

When I die after a battle and I load a game then the map cursor keeps on going up and I cannot stop this without exiting the game.

The map music played when I started but once the ghost finished talking to me the music stopped and never played again. The fighting sounds seem a bit delayed, I'd hit and a little while later the sounds would play. But this might be an issue with my phone because it doesn't like to have lots of music in J2me games, so I turned all music/sounds off.

The arrow gets shot from my waist and not from the bow (this could be due to the canvas scaling).

The stats/skills selection scroll overlaps the word "intelligence" with the number, but this is probably because the phone uses different font sizes.

It seemed that I got a lot more experience when I played as the archer than when I played as the fighter. I was battling mostly those little black things.

Now onto some suggestions:If the menus allowed wrapped scrolling it would make life a bit easier.The map guy can walk a bit faster (and the overall pace of the game could be faster, but this might again be because of my phone)If you could maybe get touchscreen to work for moving on the map and battles then it would be really great.

And now the praises:The game looks pretty good. The walking animations are great.The different clothes for the different classes are a nice touch. But what's up with the red hair guy in the shorts? Maybe you could make the map guy look a bit like my actual character?

But overall I quite enjoyed this game. It seems as if you put quite a lot of effort into this game. How long have you worked on this?

You're close (at least for my situation). I actually started it like 5 years ago

Well I've never attempted an MMORPG because I've never had the motivation to make one. I only started with java 4 years when ago in high school. Roughly in the 3 years of high school java we learned to bubble sort, manipulate strings and do simple swing windows. So I had to take it upon myself to learn double buffering from KGPJ and figure out how to make the game as modular as possible (waves, levels, ships, shots, etc. stored in files) and how to load stuff and manage everything. Suffice to say that was hectic enough. I did at a point consider doing a DnD influenced RPG but quickly dropped that idea because I didn't want to write a story.

Now the reason why MMORPGs never really had my attention is because online gaming isn't exactly the most popular thing in my country. If we wanted social gaming it would be by means of LAN. Most of the time the games would be FPS or RTS. And I have no real need to make those kinds of games, especially when games like UT already exist.

The games I would be interested in nowadays would be more 2d oriented with LOTS of destruction and dismemberment. Seeing violence in 2d is soooo much fun. Aah, Soldier of Fortune, how I miss doing a lobotomy with my knife....

They have gone crazy because they always wanted to make a MMORPG and never had the guts to start doing it?

Hehehe. No, we have gone crazy because we live in a simulated world and at the current rate of expansion of the universe we will continue to spawn simulations and never reach our original selves.

The problem I have with this "go for it" philosophy is that it needs to bee seen in context. If someone has been doing game programming for a while and then decided to do an MMORPG then "go for it" is a good idea. But I don't know how many games trussel has done before, when doing something of an MMORPG scale it is quite likely that he might pick some bad programming habits.

princec, I think the word MMORPG is more common than just ORPG or MORPG, thats why people mentally associate the word MMORPG with any online game with more than a few human players in a RPG environment. I don't think I've seen a game specifically branded as ORPG or MORPG, only MMORPG.

I am a butterfly, dreaming of being a robot. But how can I, a mere butterfly know of robots? Or am I a robot dreaming of a butterfly dreaming of a robot? Or am I attempting to make an MMORPG with no experience?Or am I an uncaught exception, dreaming of being an asserted c++ division by zero?

Oh what horrors have I unleashed upon this world...Paging through some necromancy books I stumbled upon the ultimate evil of forcing 2 seperate instances of the Matrix to coincide. Oh forgive me for this attrocity I burdened the world with. I can only give my method in a short way...oh no, it has come. I hear sounds at my door: as if that damned creature from the upheaved rotten ocean beds have come for me, to finish it's job. And I have no more morphine to numb the horrors of the beast. Time is running out, then the window: I must jump, before that horrible beast lays its forsaken tentacles on me....

Well we are making an MMORPG. See Riven's post on the previous page. The goal of the game is to see whose avatar codes the best MMORPG. So if one of you can start on an engine simulating engine, that would be great.

This is probably slightly off-topic, but what do you people think of a (mm)orpg on j2me? The last time I played any j2me game (about 2 years ago) I was only aware of 1 such online multi user rpg, but the game never worked correctly so I deleted it. I don't know if more exist now, but since people are apparently so into mmorpgs and cellphones are becoming more and more powerful (and you probably have it near you most of the time) I was wondering when some major j2me (mm)orpg was going to be released (if not already)?

It's obvious. If you know how to use a poly-alphabetic multi-character set reverse hash glossolalial encryption algorithm and you threw that into a big cauldron with newt's eye, unicorn horn and dragon scale then you would understand.

I haven't looked at any of the games, but why did you compile to 1.6? How many non-programmers do you think would have downloaded 1.6 by now? I know it's not that hard to just download 1.6, but are the improvements you get by using 1.6 really worth that much?

Something that I wonder about is why almost everyone wants to make an MMORPG or similar, especially for their first project.

What's the psychology behind wanting to make a different mmorpg from those that already exist? Is what you expect from an mmorpg really so much different from what they offer? Or do people want to start out with an mmo because there's less content to make? Since mmo's are usually open-ended they don't need to have a real story?

I have to agree with Varg of Burzum fame when he asked why everyone wants to make their own music (especially if they're just going to copy something existing and not add anything new or interesting). It's the same for games. Everyone wants a piece of the pie, but not many people really bring something innovating to the table. People should rather make interesting shorter games. I'd rather read a lot of well-done short stories than read a bunch of duplicated, long-winded novels.

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